Why Did We Start RapportBoost.AI?

Transcribed from Dr. Michael Housman’s Lecture at UC Berkeley Business School in May 2017.

I wanted to build a platform that leverages data science and analytics in areas that I personally am very interested in, which are language and communication. I co-founded RapportBoost with a few colleagues of mine, having seen a couple of changes in the artificial intelligence market.

First off, mobile phones are everywhere, but not only are people using their phones to buy things, but 60%, 66% of mobile users have bought a product in the last week. Number two, Gen Y and Millennials, interact very differently from other folks. I guess in my generation and older, right? They don’t like to pick up the phone. And they’re not big fans of email either. They love to chat and message; we can see that reflected in dating in the current day, right? No one picks up the phone anymore and calls, everyone likes to do chat and messaging.

But, what’s interesting to me is that companies that are spending millions and millions of dollars on various forms of funnel optimization. Everyone knows about their funnel. We want customers to start at the top. We want to get a lot of people in the top so we’re going to optimize landing pages, we’re gonna optimize our Facebook page, we’re gonna optimize our website, and we’re gonna optimize our email outbound campaigns, we’re gonna A/B test subject lines and all that stuff and companies have adopted that wholeheartedly optimize the top of the funnel. Then once someone engages they say, okay we’re gonna leave this up to random chance. We are going to hope that we train our people well enough to engage properly.

And, I saw that and I thought, that this seems silly right? You will think that that same approach for funnel optimization should continue from the day someone interacts with you, to the day in which they either buy a product or they come back again and continue buying your services. And so anticipating that bots would be going to take over in e-commerce —and I’m a big believer in conversational commerce — we thought, well listen bots aren’t there yet, the ecosystem is very early, what we’re going to do is we’re going to build an Emotional Intelligence command platform and we’re gonna help human agents with Emotional Intelligence. We’re gonna help them build rapport. Some are good, some are not so good. Coaching and training live chat agents is a pain, QA is very very challenging.

We are going to make humans even better at building relationships.

Learn more about the live chat sales funnel optimization from the team at RapportBoost.

About Tony Medrano

Tony started his career as a technology entrepreneur out of his Stanford University dorm as co-founder and President of DoDots, the first desktop-to-mobile app platform. He built the company to 100+ employees, raised $25M in venture capital and managed all company operations, personnel and deals.
He was most recently CEO of Boopsie, a mobile Platform-as-a-Service company that he grew for 4 years and successfully sold to a strategic partner in 2015. Tony has also served as Vice President of Sales / Business Development at Reply! and SmartDrive Systems.
Tony has dedicated his career in technology to leading sales teams and understands the need for automation tools that help sales reps increase efficiency, close more business and increase margins.
Tony received his MBA and JD from Stanford, M.A. from Columbia and B.A. from Harvard.